The Distress Call
by chocolatecheesecakes
Summary: The Ministry for Magic receives a plea for help from the depths of Ireland but due to some rather annoying circumstances they weren't able to act on the plea for three entire months. So, three months later, Harry, Ron, Hermione and a very pregnant Ginny set off for Ireland. And Skulduggery almost kills an innocent bag of crisps.


**This is where I say 'yes, I spent my weekend writing this' and 'no, I don't regret a thing. This is a Skulduggery Pleasant/Harry Potter crossover. **

**There is zero point to this story. It's just a lot of crack. I had fun writing it.**

**I have no idea how this should have really ended. I made it up, and I think it might have ended slightly better if I hadn't felt so impatient. But yeah.**

**Enjoy, read, and review!**

An Irish Plea For Help

The street was quiet. Naturally, no birds were singing, no people were talking, no cars were moving, as it was every other single Sunday morning in Roarhaven.

Most rational people would come up with the explanation that everyone was in church, but there was no church in Roarhaven, on account of the town being purely populated by sorcerers. No one really subscribed to a religion, unless you counted the small group of Necromancers that met every other Wednesday by the lake in the centre of the town.

There had been a case when one of the sorcerers up at the Sanctuary began to convert to Buddhism, but he was quickly and humanely disposed of.

The silence pressed on for a long time, minutes that turned into hours. If you had listened, very carefully, then you might have heard one of Skulduggery Pleasant's many back-up cars backfire, but that was the only noise.

"GET OUT OF MY PUB!"

With a loud smashing sound, the unfortunate drunkard flew through the pub's window, landing with a thump on the pavement outside. The landlord of the pub leaped out after the victim in this situation, aiming a kick at his prone body.

"I SAID GET OUT!" The landlord repeated, ignoring the fact that the drunkard was now safely out of the pub and that the man on the floor in front of his was far too unconscious to hear him. "GET OUT OF MY PUB!"

The drunk on the ground groaned and stirred feebly, his eyes blinking open to reveal that, a: he was not drunk and b: he was quite astonishingly confused.

"Sorry." He groaned, sitting upright as the landlord of the pub moved away. "What the- argh, god that hurts."

"We don't like strangers here." The landlord hissed, moving forward again, but slowly, as if he was a little scared. "You get that, Ginge?"

"Yep, absolutely." By the sounds of it, 'Ginge' was neither worried nor taking the situation seriously. "Just out of interest though – by 'we' do you mean you and the voices in your head? Or you and the ten invisible people standing around us?"

The landlord sneered, revealing two rows of yellowing teeth. "I meant the _town, _Ginge." He stated, as if it should have been obvious. "I'm one of the nice ones around here. Be glad you didn't meet anyone else."

The ginger man on the ground just nodded again, rubbing his stomach absent-mindedly with the air of someone that had just walked into a lion's cage and was only half-aware of the consequences. "I don't suppose you have any food, do you?" He asked hopefully, looking up at the landlord.

"Don't push your luck Ginger." The landlord snarled, but awkwardly stretching a long arm back through the broken window and picking up a bag of prawn cocktail crisps.

"Thanks mate." 'Ginger' grinned as the landlord threw the crisps at him. He stood up, muttering a couple of choice nonsense curse words under his breath as his muscles strained against his effort to move, pushing his arms over his head and stretching the limbs out. "You wouldn't happen to know the way to Dublin, would you?"

"What is it with British people?" The landlord muttered, leaping back through the broken pub window, effectively ending the conversation.

The ginger man, once the landlord was firmly out of earshot, produced a long, thin strip of rounded wood from his pocket. Glancing once over his shoulder to check that he was alone, he muttered an incantation under his breath that made all of the glass spiral back into the window frame, showing no signs that it had ever been broken to begin with.

Once the job was done, 'Ginger' nodded once at his handiwork, before looking around him again.

Roarhaven was silent once more. No one was out on the streets. It was just the ginger man, and a whole lot of dying brown grass. The lake was on the other side of the road, and the ginger man could smell it. His nose wrinkled at its stagnant smell, and his eyes flickered to the odd white building on the other shore.

You couldn't hear anything from that side of the town, the ginger man was sure. But he would certainly see something, and that something seemed to be a tall, thin man in a black tailored suit standing next to a teenage girl, staring right across the lake at him.

The ginger man silently face palmed, and turned to leave, also ripping open the packet of prawn cocktail crisps and eating one. The odd 'mobile phone' device that his wife had given to him ('_Use only in emergencies!'_) weighed down heavily in his coat pocket, but the ginger man didn't know how to use the 'mobile phone' and, anyway, he doubted that it would be much help with both his wife and his best friend stuck in horrendous traffic outside Dublin.

So he was on his own.

When 'Ginger' looked back up from his crisps, there was no sign of the tall, smartly dressed thin man and his teenage friend. He exhaled, stuffed another crisp in his mouth, and stepped out into the road.

And that was when the purple Ford Fiesta almost ran him over.

oOo

Valkyrie looked at the Purple Menace, then up at Skulduggery. "Please?" She asked, trying not to liken the poor car to an erroneous aubergine that had sprouted wheels and decided to spend its life on motorways and roads.

"It's fine!" Skulduggery insisted, yet again, leaning down and examining the exhaust pipe. "It only backfired, it won't kill us or anything."

"Good for you." Valkyrie grumbled, rolling her eyes. "You're already dead, remember?"

"I have a consciousness, I can still technically 'die'." Skulduggery said, not looking up from the exhaust.

After his partner didn't answer, he straightened up again, looking right at a very not-pleased Valkyrie. He waited for a second, before his shoulders sagged. "Okay, I'm dead." He said, in a resigned voice.

"Good." Valkyrie nodded, turning away from the Purple Menace and looking out over the stagnant lake, across to Roarhaven's only and shabbiest pub. The landlord since Scapegrace had been arrested was a nice enough guy, unless you provoked him, and then he was a git.

But Scapegrace was only in for petty theft (what else could you be done for when you were a zombie living in a freezer?) so soon that landlord would be back to doing whatever he did when he wasn't pub-sitting.

Maybe he should go into children's party hosting. Valkyrie would definitely suggest that to the guy.

Talking of which, the landlord was outside today. Valkyrie was about to wave a greeting, before she noticed _why _the landlord was outside today.

"Uh… Skulduggery?" She asked, unable to tear her eyes from the incredibly odd sight.

"Yes, I'm dead, what's the matter?" Skulduggery grumbled, looking up from the dashboard of the Purple Menace. "This car will not kill _you_ if that's what you're aft…" His sentence trailed off as he saw what Valkyrie was staring at. "Ah."

The ginger guy on the other side of the lake was watching the landlord of the pub leap back inside his pub. He wasn't a local – that much was made clear by the odd assortment of clothes he was wearing, a thick woollen jumper that looked like it was made by his grandmother with a red sort of anorak thing, as if it was about to rain.

But what really caught Skulduggery and Valkyrie's attention was how the ginger man pulled out a strange wooden stick and seemingly fixed the window of the pub with it.

"That's not Necromancy magic, is it?" Valkyrie asked, out of the side of her mouth, feeling no pull to this ginger guy's stick thing with her ring, like she would do if his stick thing carried Necromancy magic. Skulduggery shook his head, and they both continued to watch as the ginger guy looked in their direction.

When the two parties locked gazes, Skulduggery held his hand out for the keys to the Purple Menace. "As soon as he looks away." He said simply, not looking away from 'Ginger'.

'Ginger' eventually looked down to open his packet of crisps, and Valkyrie ran around to the passenger side door of the Purple Menace, strapping herself in seconds before Skulduggery pushed the clutch down.

They zoomed around the lake, arriving on the other side just as 'Ginger' stepped out into the road, Skulduggery screeched to an abrupt halt, and the ginger man jumped backwards, eyes wide as his crisps went everywhere.

"I'm terribly sorry." Skulduggery said cheerfully, climbing out of the car, Valkyrie not a step behind him. "But I think I'm going to have to place you under arrest."

The ginger man's jaw dropped. "My wife's going to kill me." He groaned. "I was only trying to get to Dublin…"

"Well Dublin's about 100 or so miles that way." Skulduggery waved a hand in the odd direction of east, or thereabouts. "So you're a bit off."

As the ginger man looked to where Skulduggery was pointing, Skulduggery swung his fist into the man's jaw, knocking the ginger man out.

"Hey!" Valkyrie complained, staring down at the ginger man's prone body. "He was _literally_ doing nothing!"

"Exactly." Skulduggery said, tilting the rim of his hat. "He didn't show any reaction to me being a skeleton."

oOo

100-ish miles away, Hermione Weasley was sitting in a traffic jam, berating ever single driver and person around their car over and over again. The only other passenger, a man with messy black hair that looked to be in his twenties, had long since succumbed to sleep, his forehead pressed against the window and his breath fogging up the inside.

"…So what if it's _rugby_?" Hermione scoffed, glowering at the driver that had dared to bleep his horn at her. "I swear to god, I'm never coming to Ireland again if all the traffic is like _this_."

She sighed, glancing in the wing mirror. Then she slammed her palm against the steering wheel, letting out a loud honk of her car horn. Her passenger started awake, his forehead slamming against the window in his shock.

"Bloody hell Hermione!" Harry swore, rubbing the affected area.

"At least you're awake _now_." Hermione sniffed, looking out of her window as Harry tried to regain some normalness with his hair. "Where did you say Ginny was meeting us?"

"The Liffey Hotel." Harry yawned, stretching his arms above his head. "Any word from Ron?"

"None." Hermione rolled her eyes. "I bet he's lost that mobile phone I gave him or something. Probably out in a pub somewhere-"

"He's on duty Hermione." Harry reminded her, glancing out of the windscreen. "The traffic's looking a little better."

"Good!" The driver retorted, beeping her horn at a rude driver. "Your wife is quite astonishingly pregnant and we're stuck in a traffic jam!"

"The baby," Harry began, used to this topic of conversation. "Is not due for another three days."

"Exactly!" Hermione threw her arms up in the air. "We don't want the baby to be born over here! We need to find these _sorcerers _or whatever they're called and respond to that plea for help Kingsley received three months ago."

Harry closed his eyes. "Hermione, I have nothing against my first child being born in Ireland." He sighed. "So _please _just let me go back to sleep."

Hermione waved her hand at him, massaging her temple with two fingers. This trip really wasn't all it cracked up to be. They'd been in Ireland for all of twelve hours and already she'd lost her husband and got stuck in atrocious traffic.

They had been advised (read: told) to keep a low profile – in this instance become Muggles for the trip. So that meant a hire car, Hermione driving because she was the only one of the people that had come to Ireland that could drive. And, because the _rugby_ was on, it also meant atrocious traffic.

She was shocked out of her stupor by the loud, overly cheerful tinny ringtone that meant that her phone was ringing. In a flash the little Nokia brick-like thing was in her hand, and when the letters 'R-O-N-A-L-D' had fully sunk in, Hermione pressed the 'accept call' button without a second thought.

"Hello?" She called down the line.

"Is this Mrs Weasley?" The man on the other hand wasn't Ron; that was for sure. His voice was deeper, and smoother, and Hermione tensed.

"May I ask who's calling please?" She responded, keeping one eye on the road – just in case the traffic started to move.

"Detective Inspector Pleasant." The man continued. "Assuming that this is in fact Mrs Weasley, then we have your husband in custody."

"Merlin's balls." Hermione swore, thumping her head against the car horn (the horn let out a strangled beep in protest). "What's he done this time?"

"He was taken in for questioning." Pleasant's voice responded. "He's done nothing of major consequence, it's just a precautionary measure. We do need a family member to collect Mr Weasley from Roarhaven, however."

"I'm currently stuck in Dublin." Hermione sighed. "But as soon as we pick up my friend's very pregnant wife then, sure, we can collect him."

"Thanks." Pleasant continued. "Does your husband have any previous criminal records that we can use as evidence against him?"

"…No?"

Pleasant seemed to sag on the other end of the line. "That's annoying." He observed. "I haven't had a chance to arrest someone properly in ages."

There was a pause, a burst of laughter from the other end, and then a flatline beep. Hermione moved the phone away from her ear, and stared at it in complete fascination.

"Are you okay Hermione?" Harry asked, tapping his friend on the shoulder. "Hermione?"

Hermione shook herself awake, and managed a careful smile. "Change of plan." She explained. "We pick up Ginny, and then we go and get Ron from someplace called Roarhaven."

oOo

Ronald Weasley was sure that he had found the place where the mysterious plea for help had originated three months ago. For one thing, the people that had brought him in – Detective Pleasant, he thought the skeleton's name was – were wary of him from the start, and when he finally gave him his name and his 'mobile phone' they called Hermione almost immediately.

"Right." He said, for the eighteenth time. "Who _are _you?"

The teenage girl didn't look up from where she was playing something on _her _'mobile phone'. "I told you," She said, tiredly. "We need to wait for Ghastly to say that we can tell you things before we do."

"Right." Ron nodded, turning his attentions to a beetle's struggle with a wall. "Who's Ghastly?"

"A friend." The girl sighed, still not looking up. "Do you only ever ask stupid questions?"

Ron bristled, and shook his head, despite the fact that the girl had still not looked up. He had learnt a few tricks from his time with George and the joke shop, and now was the perfect opportunity to apply them.

He immediately banished all thoughts of telling the girl one of his many 'An Englishman, a Scottishman and an Irishman' jokes in his – admittedly limited – repertoire, as he guessed that they wouldn't go down very well.

"What do you get if you cross a sheep with a trampoline?" Ron finally decided upon, wincing as the teenage girl looked up, slowly. She stared at him, like she was daring for him to finish his sentence. After a few minutes where they just stared one another down, Ron exhaled.

"A woolly jumper." He concluded.

"That was pathetic." The teenage girl said, cracking a little smile. "Are all your jokes that bad?"

Ron thought of his many 'An Englishman, Scottishman and Irishman' jokes, and shrugged.

The door banged open, making Ron jump. The skeleton-man walked in, tilting his head at the teenage girl. "Was he bothering you?" The skeleton-man asked the teenage girl.

"He was telling crap jokes." The girl responded, laughing, most likely at Ron's expense.

"That counts as bothering you." Pleasant turned from the girl to Ron, and said, very seriously: "If you tell any more jokes then I'll have you flogged."

oOo

"I'm pregnant." Ginny grumbled. "I'm pregnant and tired and being driven out to a random town in the middle of nowhere."

"Take deep breaths love." Harry recommended, squeezing his wife's hand. "Ron's been taken into custody."

"Oh, what's the pillock gone and done now?" Ginny yelled, knocking her head against the car window. "He _knows _I wanted the birth of my first child to be a hassle-free affair!"

"You're the wife of 'The Chosen One'." Hermione retorted, taking her hands off of the steering wheel just long enough to make quotation marks in the air. "Nothing can ever be simple Ginny. Nothing."

Ginny muttered some sort of assent, released her grip on her husband's hand, and closed her eyes. "Please don't honk the horn Hermione." She said sleepily.

"I can't promise." Hermione muttered, eyeing a yellow car beadily. "Sometimes I really wonder why Muggles use cars."

"Me too." Harry concurred, as one of the car's front wheels went into a pothole. "What time will we get to Roarhaven, Hermione?"

Hermione checked the time on the clock on the dashboard. "About two in the morning." She said confidently. "If we hadn't got holed up again outside of Dublin then we might have made it for one-thirty."

"Because that makes it _so much better_." Harry said sarcastically, looking sideways at the sleeping figure of his wife. "You're telling Ginny, if she wakes up."

"Thanks." Hermione replied dryly, watching the streetlights of the latest little Irish town drift by as she drove them all to god knows where.

oOo

"You can't _actually _have me flogged, can you?" Ron asked anxiously, looking up at the scarred man, who was dressed in black robes and sitting on a throne, as it seemed.

The scarred man rolled his eyes, and glared at Pleasant. "Skulduggery, apologise to Mr Weasley." He said sternly.

"Sorry." Skulduggery muttered, not looking up from his coffee.

"And that's all we'll get from him!" The scarred man said, faux-cheerfully. "I'm Ghastly Bespoke, the unfortunate head of this little… What do we call ourselves?"

"Outpost?" The teenage girl suggested, looking up from her 'mobile phone' again.

"Outpost." Ghastly said, a beaming smile on his face. "Right, so my associate here knocked you out so we could take you in for questioning."

The scarred man waited for a couple of seconds, as if someone was due to leap out of the shadows. "Um… So we could take you in for questioning?" He called out again, to no avail.

"Is something supposed to happen?" Ron asked, rather unhelpfully. He received a glare from the scarred man for his troubles.

"Skulduggery, did you bother telling Tipstaff to bring the Cleavers down?" Ghastly asked Pleasant, raising an eyebrow.

Skulduggery shrugged. "Tipstaff annoys me." He said simply, in his smooth tones. "I simply glared at him to tell him to bring Cleavers down, but as he is an insufferable idiot he just glared back and scurried off."

"So it's just us three."

"Four?" Ron corrected, waving his hand around a bit.

"Shut up, peasant." The scarred man said pompously, not looking down at Ron, but instead resuming his glaring at the skeleton man. "What do you suggest we do then?"

"I suggest we interrogate him." The teenage girl said, in a bored tone, finally putting her 'mobile phone' back in her pocket and standing up. "Mr Weasley, my name is Detective Inspector Cain and I will be your interrogator for this… Erm, middle of the night."

"Hey!" Skulduggery cut in, but Cain raised her hand to cut him off.

"You forget the Cleavers, you lose your privileges." She retorted, ignoring Skulduggery's huff and turning back to Ron. "Mr Weasley, can you please explain why you're in Ireland?"

Ron was torn. If he told them, then he might be compromising the safety of the Wizarding World. But if he didn't, then it looked increasingly more likely that he might receive another blow to the head from the skeleton-man.

"It's a work thing." He finally said. "We received a plea for help from somewhere in Ireland, about three months ago. They finally sent out a search party yesterday – me, my wife, my best friend and my pregnant sister."

"You mean 'my wife, my best friend, my pregnant sister and I'." Pleasant grumbled under his breath, but Cain and Ghastly sat up a little straighter.

"Ah." Ghastly breathed, closing his eyes. "A plea for help, three months ago, you said."

Ron nodded – once up, once down. Cain face palmed, and Ghastly looked sideways at Skulduggery.

"You came… A little late." Cain said, obviously trying to keep a straight face. "That was all sorted out three months ago."

"Wha-?" Ron rubbed his eyes. "You mean, we came all the way out here, _for nothing_."

Ghastly nodded, also trying to stifle laughter. "Tell Kingsley sorry from me." He apologised.

This caught Ron's attention. "Hey- you know Kingsley?" He asked curiously.

"Ages ago." Ghastly waved a hand around a bit, probably trying to show just how long ago it had been, but only managing to look like an idiot. "He was trying to put a sheep back in its field. I intervened."

"Oh, is that the time that you blew up half of that place in Wales?" Cain perked up considerably. "You never told be about that."

"I did." Skulduggery cut in glumly, taking his hat off his head and pretending to brush imaginary dust off its brim. "But you didn't listen."

"You probably told me when we were battling some demonic hell-beast." Cain grumbled, rolling her eyes. "Ghastly, tell me."

"We don't fight demonic hell-beasts Valkyrie, that would just be silly." Skulduggery said calmly.

"Call me 'Elder Bespoke' and I will." Ghastly said smugly, leaning backwards in his throne-thing.

Ron waved his hand in the air again. "Excuse me," He began, catching the room's attention. "But does that mean that you know about-"

"Yes, most of us do." Skulduggery answered this time, with a nod. "Valkyrie here doesn't, however."

"Know about _what_?"

oOo

Hermione pulled into a small parking space outside a large white building, next to a bright purple Ford Fiesta that seemed to have seen better days. "We're here." She said tiredly, resting her head against the top of the steering wheel.

"Good." Ginny said sleepily, elbowing her slumbering husband sharply in the side as means to wake him. "Harry? We're here."

"Are we?" Harry questioned groggily, sitting upright and stretching. "Thank Merlin's thong."

"We'd better get Ronald." Hermione sighed, turning around and surveying the backseat-cum-bed. "You're both coming with me."

"Good, I want to give my idiot brother a nice black eye." Ginny muttered, pushing the side door open and awkwardly climbing out.

When all three of them were out in the cold, Hermione pressed the little button with a key on it on her remote car control. The car made a conspicuously loud beeping noise that made Harry jump, and the headlights flashed back on once more, and then the car was silent.

"Do you think they'll make us coffee?" Ginny asked Hermione, as they both naturally hung back to make Harry go ahead of them both.

"They'd better, I've been driving all day." Hermione grumbled, rubbing her eyes.

The door opened for them as soon as they got within a thirty-inch radius, and Ginny made a pleased grunting noise. "Good service here." She noted.

The corridor stretched ahead of them, pitch-black. Harry again took the first, cautious step in, and activated a cheap strip light above their heads, illuminating a staircase spiralling downward, with no sign of a lift anywhere.

"I take that back." Ginny grumbled, grabbing the stair rail.

After a few minutes of walking down the stairs, the lights lighting up ahead of them as they moved, they hit solid floor. Harry exhaled, helping his wife down the last five or so steps. Hermione blinked in the harsh light, looking around them at the bright white painted hallway.

"Are you Ron Weasley's family?"

A teenage girl walked out of a room on the right of the hall, taking them all by surprise. When no one volunteered this information, she nodded knowingly. "I know; I wouldn't want to admit it either." She said grumpily. "Are you all bloody 'magical' too?" The girl asked, making quotation marks with her fingers.

"Yes." Harry said shortly, blinking a few times. "You wouldn't happen to have any coffee, would you?"

The teenage girl ignored his question, pushing open the door of the room she had just exited and gesturing inside. "He's in here." She explained curtly.

Ginny pushed past the girl without a second glance, taking the girl aback considerably, and marched up to Ron, smacking him around the face. "RONALD WEASLEY!" She screamed at him, shaking with anger. "I'M PREGNANT AND YET I FIND MYSELF CHASING OVER HALF OF EFFING IRELAND TO FIND YOU!"

"Good to see you too Ginny." Ron cowered away from her, his eyes widening as the object of his undivided terror came stomping towards them as well. "Um… Hi Hermione..."

"Ronald Weasley." Hermione said softly, and immediately Harry flinched. "What do you think you're doing here?"

"Actually," Ron perked up a little, looking rather pleased with himself. "I found the source of that plea for help we received!"

oOo

Half an hour later, the two annoyed females were pacified with large amounts of coffee, and Harry was given a considerable amount of the liquid caffeine as well to compensate for the teenage girl's (who turned out to be named Valkyrie) rudeness.

Everything was explained to them all in minute detail, taking no prisoners. From the origins of why they 'pleaed out' in the first place (which was due to loads of shadow things that people swallowed and then went evil), to the differences between the wizard's magic and the mage's magic (Valkyrie huffed).

Ginny, as Ron had guessed, did not seem best pleased. She rested her head in her hands, pulled a face as her stomach got in her way, and looked dead at Ghastly Bespoke, who had the grace to look at least a little ashamed. "So." She said, very slowly. "I'm in Ireland for nothing, five days away from my due date."

"That is as things seem, Mrs Potter." Skulduggery nodded, turning to his partner unconcernedly. "Ah, Valkyrie, what would you say to me taking you back home after we finish this up?"

Valkyrie moaned from where she was trying to sleep on the table.

"Well," Hermione sat up a little straighter – as she seemed to be the only fully conscious visitor. "This was very nice and all, but I think it would be good if we got back to our hotel in Dublin so we can depart tomorrow morning and explain this… All… To… Our… Minster… That is, if we can."

"Kingsley already knows." Ghastly said triumphantly. "I met him when we blew up a Welsh field together!"

"…That was entirely you." Skulduggery corrected.

"But it _was_ nice to meet you." Ghastly continued, ignoring his friend and standing up to shake Hermione's hand. "Sorry about everything coming a little… late. But if we ever need any more help we'll know who to call."

"_Not me._" Valkyrie groaned again, waving her left hand a little listlessly in the air.

Harry stirred from his doze, smiled slightly dreamily, and also shook Ghastly's hand. "Good to meet you." He said, nodding as well. "Really… rather good."

However, Ginny didn't stand up, or even make any moves to. She went green, swallowed, and then looked up at her husband.

When she spoke, it was in a whisper.

"Harry…" Ginny said, eyes wide. "My… my waters just broke."


End file.
